IT was close to dawn on Christmas Day when we came home from the Rue d'Odessa with a couple of Negresses from the telephone company.  The fire was out and we were all so tired that we climbed into bed with our clothes on.  The one I had, who had been like a bounding leopard all evening, fell sound asleep as I was climbing over her.  For a while I worked over her as one works over a person who has been drowned or asphyxiated.  Then I gave it up and fell sound asleep myself.

      All during the holidays we had champagne morning, noon and night - the cheapest and the best champagne.  With the turn of the year I was to leave for Dijon where I had been offered a trivial post as exchange professor of English, one of those Franco-American amity arrangements which is supposed to promote understanding and good will between sister republics.  Fillmore was more elated than I by the prospect - he had good reason to be.  For me it was just a transfer from one purgatory to another.  There was no future ahead of me; there wasn't even a salary attached to the job.  One was supposed to consider himself fortunate to enjoy the privilege of spreading the gospel of Franco-American amity.  It was a job for a rich man's son.

      The night before I left we had a good time.  About dawn it began to snow: we walked about from one quarter to another taking a last look at Paris.  Passing through the Rue St. Dominique we suddenly fell upon a little square and there was the Église Ste.-Clotilde.  People were going to mass.  Fillmore, whose head was still a little cloudy, was bent on going to mass too.  "For the fun of it!" as he put it.  I felt somewhat uneasy about it; in the first place I had never attended a mass, and in the second place I looked seedy and felt seedy.  Fillmore, too, looked rather battered, even more disreputable than myself; his big slouch hat was on assways and his overcoat was still full of sawdust from the last joint we had been in.  The worst they could do would be to throw us out.

      I was so astounded by the sight that greeted my eyes that I lost all uneasiness.  It took me a little while to get adjusted to the dim light.  I stumbled around behind Fillmore, holding his sleeve.  A weird, unearthly noise assailed my ears, a sort of hollow drone that rose up out of the cold flagging.  A huge, dismal tomb it was with mourners shuffling in and out.  A sort of antechamber to the world below.  Temperature about 55 or 60 Fahrenheit.  No music except this undefinable dirge manufactured in the subcellar - like a million heads of cauliflower wailing in the dark.  People in shrouds were chewing away with that hopeless, dejected look of beggars who hold out their hands in a trance and mumble an unintelligible appeal.

      That this sort of thing existed I knew, but then one also knows that there are slaughterhouses and morgues and dissecting rooms.  One instinctively avoids such places.  In the street I had often passed a priest with a little prayerbook in his hands laboriously memorizing his lines.  Idiot, I would say to myself, and let it go at that.  In the street one meets with all forms of dementia and the priest is by no means the most striking.  Two thousand years of it has deadened us to the idiocy of it.  However, when you are suddenly transported to the very midst of his realm, when you see the little world in which the priest functions like an alarm clock, you are apt to have entirely different sensations.

      For a moment all this slaver and twitching of the lips almost began to have a meaning.  Something was going on, some kind of dumb show which, not rendering me wholly stupefied, held me spellbound.  All over the world, wherever there are these dim-lit tombs, you have this incredible spectacle - the same mean temperature, the same crepuscular glow, the same buzz and drone.  All over Christendom, at certain stipulated hours, people in black are grovelling before the altar where the priest stands up with a little book in one hand and a dinner bell or atomizer in the other and mumbles to them in a language which, even if it were comprehensible, no longer contains a shred of meaning.  Blessing them, most likely.  Blessing the country, blessing the ruler, blessing the firearms and the battleships and the ammunition and the hand grenades.  Surrounding him on the altar are little boys dressed like angels of the Lord who sing alto and soprano.  Innocent lambs.  All in skirts, sexless, like the priest himself who is usually flat-footed and nearsighted to boot.  A fine epicene caterwauling.  Sex in a jockstrap, to the tune of J-mol.

      I was taking it in as best I could in the dim light.  Fascinating and stupefying at the same time.  All over the civilized world, I thought to myself.  All over the world.  Marvellous.  Rain or shine, hail, sleet, snow, thunder, lightning, war, famine, pestilence - makes not the slightest difference.  Always the same mean temperature, the same mumbo- jumbo, the same high-laced shoes and the little angels of the Lord singing soprano and alto.  Near the exit a little slot-box - the carry on the heavenly work.  So that God's blessing may rain down upon king and country and battleships and high explosives and tanks and airplanes, so that the worker may have more strength in his arms, strength to slaughter horses and cows and sheep, strength to punch holes in iron girders, strength to sew buttons on other people's pants, strength to sell carrots and sewing machines and automobiles, strength to exterminate insects and clean stables and unload garbage cans and scrub lavatories, strength to write headlines and chop tickets in the subway.  Strength ... strength.  All that lip chewing and hornswoggling just to furnish a little strength!

      We were moving about from one spot to another, surveying the scene with that clear-headedness which comes after an all- night session.  We must have made ourselves pretty conspicuous shuffling about that way with our coat collars turned up and never once crossing ourselves and never once moving our lips except to whisper some callous remark.  Perhaps everything would have passed off without notice if Fillmore hadn't insisted on walking past the altar in the midst of the ceremony.  He was looking for the exit, and he thought while he was at it, I suppose, that he would take a good squint at the holy of holies, get a close-up on it, as it were.  We had gotten safely by and were marching toward a crack of light which must have been the way out when a priest suddenly stepped out of the gloom and blocked our path.  Wanted to know where we were going and what we were doing.  We told him politely enough that we were looking for the exit.  We said "exit" because at the moment we were so flabbergasted that we couldn't think of the French for exist.  Without a word of response he took us firmly by the arm and, opening the door, a side door it was, he gave us a push and out we tumbled into the blinding light of day.  It happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that when we hit the sidewalk we were in a daze.  We walked a few paces, blinking our eyes, and then instinctively we both turned round; the priest was still standing on the steps, pale as a ghost and scowling like the devil himself.  He must have been sore as hell.  Later, thinking back on it, I couldn't blame him for it.  But at that moment, seeing him with his long skirts and the little skullcap on his cranium, he looked so ridiculous that I burst out laughing.  I looked at Fillmore and he began to laugh too.  For a full minute we stood there laughing right in the poor bugger's face.  He was so bewildered, I guess, that for a moment he didn't know what to do; suddenly, however, he started down the steps on the run, shaking his fist at us as if he were in earnest.  When he swung out of the enclosure he was on the gallop.  By this time some preservative instinct warned me to get a move on.  I grabbed Fillmore by the coat sleeve and started to run.  He was saying, like an idiot:  "No, no!  I won't run!" - "Come on!" I yelled, "we'd better get out of here.  That guy's mad clean through."  And off we ran, beating it as fast as our legs would carry us.

      On the way to Dijon, still laughing about the affair, my thoughts reverted to a ludicrous incident, of a somewhat similar nature, which occurred during by brief sojourn in Florida.  It was during the celebrated boom when, like thousands of others, I was caught with my pants down.  Trying to extricate myself I got caught, along with a friend of mine, in the very neck of the bottle.  Jacksonville, where we were marooned for about six weeks, was practically in a state of siege.  Every bum on earth, and a lot of guys who had never been bums before, seemed to have drifted into Jacksonville.  The YMCA, the Salvation Army, the firehouses and police stations, the hotels, the lodging houses, everything was full up.  Complet absolutely, and signs everywhere to that effect.  The residents of Jacksonville had become so hardened that it seemed to me as if they were walking around in coats of mail.  It was the old business of food again.  Food and a place to flop.  Food was coming up from below in trainloads - oranges and grapefruit and all sorts of juicy edibles.  We used to pass by the freight sheds looking for rotten fruit - but even that was scarce.

      One night, in desperation, I dragged my friend Joe to a synagogue, during the service.  It was a Reformed congregation, and the rabbi impressed me rather favourably.  The music got me too - that piercing lamentation of the Jews.  As soon as the service was over I marched to the rabbi's study and requested an interview with him.  He received me decently enough - until I made clear my mission.  Then he grew absolutely frightened.  I had only asked him for a handout on behalf of my friend Joe and myself.  You would have thought, from the way he looked at me, that I had asked to rent the synagogue as a bowling alley.  To cap it all, he suddenly asked me point-blank if I was a Jew or not.  When I answered no, he seemed perfectly outraged.  Why, pray, had I come to a Jewish pastor for aid?  I told him naively that I had always had more faith in the Jews than in the Gentiles.  I said it modestly, as if it were one of my peculiar defects.  It was the truth too.  But he wasn't a bit flattered.  No, siree.  He was horrified.  To get rid of me he wrote out a note to the Salvation Army people.  "That's the place for you to address yourself," he said, and brusquely turned away to tend his flock.

      The Salvation Army, of course, had nothing to offer us.  If we had had a quarter apiece we might have rented a mattress on the floor.  But we hadn't a nickel between us.  We went to the park and stretched ourselves out on a bench.  It was raining and so we covered ourselves with newspapers.  Weren't there more than a half hour, I imagine, when a cop came along and, without a word of warning, gave us such a sound fanning that we were up and on our feet in a jiffy, and dancing a bit too, though we weren't in any mood for dancing.  I felt so goddamned sore and miserable, so dejected, so lousy, after being whacked over the ass by that half-witted bastard, that I could have blown up the City Hall.

      The next morning, in order to get even with these hospitable sons of bitches, we presented ourselves bright and early to the door of a Catholic priest.  This time I let Joe do the talking.  He was Irish and he had a bit of a brogue.  He had very soft, blue eyes, too, and he could make them water a bit when he wanted to.  A sister in black opened the door for us; she didn't ask us inside, however.  We were to wait in the vestibule until she went and called for the good father.  In a few minutes he came, the good father, puffing like a locomotive.  And what was it we wanted disturbing his likes at that hour of the morning?  Something to eat and a place to flop, we answered innocently.  And where did we hail from, the good father wanted to know at once.  From New York.  From New York, eh?  Then ye'd better be gettin' back there as fast as ye kin, me lads, and without another word the big, bloated turnip- faced bastard shoved the door in our face.

      About an hour later, drifting around helplessly like a couple of drunken schooners, we happened to pass by the rectory again.  So help me God if the big, lecherous-looking turnip wasn't backing out of the alley in a limousine!  As he swung past us he blew a cloud of smoke into our eyes.  As though to say - "That for you!"  A beautiful limousine it was, with a couple of spare tires in the back, and the good father sitting at the wheel with a big cigar in his mouth.  Must have been a Corona Corona, so fat and luscious it was.  Sitting pretty he was, and no two ways about it.  I couldn't see whether he had skirts on or not.  I could only see the gravy trickling from his lips - and the big cigar with that fifty-cent aroma.

      All the way to Dijon I got to reminiscing about the past.  I thought of all the things I might have said and done, which I hadn't said or done, in the bitter, humiliating moments when just to ask for a crust of bread is to make yourself less than a worm.  Stone sober as I was, I was still smarting from those old insults and injuries.  I could still feel that whack over the ass which the cop gave me in the park - though that was a mere bagatelle, a little dancing lesson, you might say.  All over the States I wandered; and into Canada and Mexico.  The same story everywhere.  If you want bread you've got to get in harness, get in lock step.  Over all the earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement.  Production!  More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog biscuits, more lawnmowers, more ball bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more toothpaste, more newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums.  Forward!  Time presses.  The embryo is pushing through the neck of the womb, and there's not even a gob of spit to ease the passage.   A dry, strangulating birth.  Not a wail, not a chirp.  Salut au monde!  Salute of twenty-one guns bombinating from the rectum.  "I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out," said Walt [Whitman].  That was a time when you could still get a hat to fit your head.  But time passes.  To get a hat that fits now you have to walk to the electric chair.  They give you a skullcap.  A tight fit, what?   But no matter!  It fits.

      You have to be in a strange country like France, walking the meridian that separates the hemispheres of life and death, to know what incalculable vistas yawn ahead.  The body electric!  The democratic soul!  Flood tide!  Holy Mother of God, what does this crap mean?  The earth is parched and cracked.  Men and women come together like broods of vultures over a stinking carcass, to mate and fly apart again.  Vultures who drop from the clouds like heavy stones.  Talons and beak, that's what we are!  A huge intestinal apparatus with a nose for dead meat.  Forward!  Forward without pity, without compassion, without love, without forgiveness.  Ask no quarter and give none!  More battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives!  More genococci!  More streptococci!  More bombing machines!  More and more of it - until the whole fucking works is blown to smithereens, and the earth with it!

      Stepping off the train I knew immediately that I had made a fatal mistake.  The Lycée was a little distance from the station; I walked down the main street in the early dusk of winter, feeling my way toward my destination.  A light snow was falling, the trees sparkled with frost.  Passed a couple of huge, empty cafés that looked like dismal waiting rooms.  Silent, empty gloom - that's how it impressed me.  A hopeless, jerkwater town where mustard is turned out in carload lots, in vats and tuns and barrels and pots and cute-looking jars.

      The first glance at the Lycée sent a shudder through me.  I felt so undecided that at the entrance I stopped to debate whether I would go in or not.  But as I hadn't the price of a return ticket there wasn't much use debating the question.  I thought for a moment of sending a wire to Fillmore, but then I was stumped to know what excuse to make.  The only thing to do was to walk in with my eyes shut.

      It happened that M. le Proviseur was out - his day off, so they said.  A little hunchback came forward and offered to escort me to the office of M. le Censeur, second in charge.  I walked a little behind him, fascinated by the grotesque way in which he hobbled along.  He was a little monster, such as can be seen on the porch of any half-assed cathedral in Europe.

      The office of M. le Censeur was large and bare.  I sat down in a stiff chair to wait while the hunchback darted off to search for him.  I almost felt at home.  The atmosphere of the place reminded me vividly of certain charity bureaus back in the States where I used to sit by the hour waiting for some mealy-mouthed bastard to come and cross-examine me.

      Suddenly the door opened and, with a mincing step, M. le Censeur came prancing in.  It was all I could do to suppress a titter.  He had on just such a frock coat as Boris used to wear, and over his forehead there hung a bang, a sort of spitcurl such as Smerdyakov might have worn.  Grave and brittle, with a lynxlike eye, he wasted no words of cheer on me.  At once he brought forth the sheets on which were written the names of the students, the hours, the classes, etc., all in a meticulous hand.  He told me how much coal and wood I was allowed and after that he promptly informed me that I was at liberty to do as I pleased in my spare time.  This last was the first good thing I had heard him say.  It sounded so reassuring that I quickly said a prayer for France - for the army and for the navy, the educational system, the bistros, the whole goddamned works.

      This folderol completed, he rang a little bell, whereupon the hunchback promptly appeared to escort me to the office of M. l'Econome.  Here the atmosphere was somewhat different.  More like a freight station, with bills of lading and rubber stamps everywhere, and pasty-faced clerks scribbling away with broken pens in huge, cumbersome ledgers.  My dole of coal and wood portioned out, off we marched, the hunchback and I, with a wheelbarrow, toward the dormitory.  I was to have a room on the top floor, in the same wing as the pions.  The situation was taking on a humorous aspect.  I didn't know what the hell to expect next.  Perhaps a spittoon.  The whole thing smacked very much of preparation for a campaign; the only things missing were a knapsack and rifle - and a brass slug.

      The room assigned me was rather large, with a small stove to which we attached a crooked pipe that made an elbow just over the iron cot.  A big chest for the coal and wood stood near the door.  The windows gave out on a row of forlorn little houses all made of stone in which lived the grocer, the baker, the shoemaker, the butcher, etc. - all imbecilic-looking clodhoppers.  I glanced over the rooftops toward the bare hills where a train was clattering.  The whistle of the locomotive screamed mournfully and hysterically.

      After the hunchback had made the fire for me I inquired about the grub.  It was not quite time for dinner.  I flopped on the bed, with my overcoat on, and pulled the covers over me.  Beside me was the eternal rickety night table in which the piss pot is hidden away.  I stood the alarm on the table and watched the minutes ticking off.  Into the well of the room a bluish light filtered in from the street.  I listened to the trucks rattling by as I gazed vacantly at the stove pipe, at the elbow where it was held together with bits of wire.  The coal chest intrigued me.  Never in my life had I occupied a room with a coal chest.  And never in my life had I built a fire or taught children.  Nor, for that matter, never in my life had I worked without pay.  I felt free and chained at the same time - like one feels just before election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the right man.  I felt like a hired man, like a jack-of-all-trades, like a hunter, like a rover, like a galley slave, like a pedagogue, like a worm and a louse.  I was free, but my limbs were shackled.  A democratic soul with a free meal ticket, but no power of locomotion, no voice.  I felt like a jellyfish nailed to a plank.  Above all, I felt hungry.  The hands were moving slowly.  Still ten more minutes to kill before the fire alarm would go off.  The shadows in the room deepened.  It grew frightfully silent, a tense stillness that tautened my nerves.  Little dabs of snow clung to the windowpanes.  Far away a locomotive gave out a shrill scream.  Then a dead silence again.  The stove had commenced to glow, but there was no heat coming from it.  I began to fear that I might doze off and miss the dinner.  That would meal lying awake on an empty belly all night.  I got panic-stricken.

      Just a moment before the gong went off I jumped out of bed and, locking the door behind me, I bolted downstairs to the courtyard.  There I got lost.  One quadrangle after another, one staircase after another.  I wandered in and out of the buildings searching frantically for the refectory.  Passed a long line of youngsters marching in a column to God knows where; they moved along like a chain gang, with a slave driver at the head of the column.  Finally I got an energetic-looking individual, with a derby, heading toward me.  I stopped him to ask the way to the refectory.  Happened I stopped the right man.  It was M. le Proviseur, and he seemed delighted to have stumbled on me.  Wanted to know right away if I were comfortably settled, if there was anything more he could do for me.  I told him everything was O.K.  Only it was a bit chilly, I ventured to add.  He assured me that it was rather unusual, this weather.  Now and then the fogs came on and a bit of snow, and then it became unpleasant for a while, and so on and so forth.  All the while he had me by the arm, guiding me toward the refectory.  He seemed like a very decent chap.  A regular guy, I thought to myself.  I even went so far as to imagine that I might get chummy with him later on, that he'd invite me to his room on a bitter cold night and make a hot grog for me.  I imagined all sorts of friendly things in the few moments it required to reach the door of the refectory.  Here, my mind racing on at a mile a minute, he suddenly shook hands with me and, doffing his hat, bade me goodnight.  I was so bewildered that I tipped my hat also.  It was the regular thing to do, I soon found out.  Whenever you pass a prof, or even M. l'Econome, you doff your hat.  Might pass the same guy a dozen times a day.  Makes no difference.  You've got to give the salute, even though your hat is worn out.  It's the polite thing to do.

      Anyway, I had found the refectory.  Like an East Side clinic it was, with tiled walls, bare light, and marble-topped tables.  And of course a big stove with an elbow pipe.  The dinner wasn't served yet.  A cripple was running in and out with dishes and knives and forks and bottles of wine.  In a corner several young men conversing animatedly.  I went up to them and introduced myself.  They gave me a most cordial reception.  Almost too cordial, in fact.  I couldn't quite make it out.  In a jiffy the room began to fill up; I was presented from one to the other quickly.  Then they formed a circle about me and, filling the glasses, they began to sing....

 

                                             L'autre soir l'idée m'est venue

                                             Cré nom de Zeus d'enculer un pendu;

                                             Le vent se leve sur la potence,

                                             Voila mon pendu qui se balance,

                                             J'ai du l'enculer en sautant,

                                             Cré nom de Zeus, on est jamais content.

 

                                             Baiser dans un con trop petit,

                                             Cré nom de Zeus, on s'ecorche le vit;

                                             Baiser dans un con trop large,

                                             On ne sait pas ou l'on decharge;

                                             Se branler étant bien emmerdant,

                                             Cré nom de Zeus, on est jamais content.

 

      With this, Quasimodo announced the dinner.

      They were a cheerful group, les surveillants.  There was Kroa who belched like a pig and always let off a loud fart when he sat down to table.  He could fart thirteen times in succession, they informed me.  He held the record.  Then there was Monsieur le Prince, an athlete who was fond of wearing a tuxedo in the evening when he went to town; he had a beautiful complexion, just like a girl, and never touched the wine nor read anything that might tax his brain.  Next to him sat Petit Paul, from the Midi, who thought of nothing but cunt all the time; he used to say every day - "a partir de jeudi je ne parlerai plus de femmes."  He and Monsieur le Prince were inseparable.  Then there was Passeleau, a veritable young scallywag who was studying medicine and who borrowed right and left; he talked incessantly of Ronsard, Villon and Rabelais.  Opposite me sat Mollesse, agitator and organizer of the pions, who insisted on weighing the meat to see if it wasn't short a few grams.  He occupied a little room in the infirmary.  His supreme enemy was Monsieur l'Econome, which was nothing particularly to his credit since everybody hated this individual.  For companion Mollesse had one called Le Penible, a dour-looking chap with a hawklike profile who practised the strictest economy and acted as moneylender.  He was like an engraving by Albrecht Dürer - a composite of all the dour, sour, morose, bitter, unfortunate, unlucky and introspective devils who compose the pantheon of Germany's medieval knights.  A Jew, no doubt.  At any rate, he was killed in an automobile accident shortly after my arrival, a circumstance which left me twenty-three francs to the good.  With the exception of Renaud who sat beside me, the others have faded out of my memory; they belonged to that category of colourless individuals who make up the world of engineers, architects, dentists, pharmacists, teachers, etc.  There was nothing to distinguish them from the clods whom they would later wipe their boots on.  They were zeros in every sense of the word, ciphers who form the nucleus of a respectable and lamentable citizenry.  They ate with their heads down and were always the first to clamour for a second helping.  They slept soundly and never complained; they were neither gay nor miserable.  The indifferent ones whom Dante consigned to the vestibule of Hell.  The upper-crusters.

      It was the custom after dinner to go immediately to town, unless one was on duty in the dormitories.  In the centre of town were the cafés - huge, dreary halls where the somnolent merchants of Dijon gathered to play cards and listen to the music.  It was warm in the cafés, that is the best I can say of them.  The seats were fairly comfortable, too.  And there were always a few whores about who, for a glass of beer or a cup of coffee, would sit and chew the fat with you.  The music, on the other hand, was atrocious.  Such music!  On a winter's night, in a dirty hole like Dijon, nothing can be more harassing, more nerve-racking, than the sound of a French orchestra.  Particularly one of those lugubrious female orchestras with everything coming in squeaks and farts, with a dry, algebraic rhythm and the hygienic consistency of toothpaste.  A wheezing and scraping performed at so many francs the hour - and the devil take the hindmost!  The melancholy of it!  As if old Euclid had stood up on his hind legs and swallowed prussic acid.  The whole realm of Ideas so thoroughly exploited by the reason that there is nothing left of which to make music except the empty slats of the accordion, through which the wind whistles and tears the ether to tatters.  However, to speak of music in connection with this compost is like dreaming of champagne when you are in the death cell.  Music was the least of my worries.  I didn't even think of cunt, so dismal, so chill, so barren, so gray was it all.  On the way home the first night I noticed on the door of a café an inscription from the Gargantua.  Inside the café it was like a morgue.  However, forward!

      I had plenty of time on my hands and not a sou to spend.  Two or three hours of conversational lessons a day, and that was all.  And what use was it, teaching these poor bastards English?  I felt sorry as hell for them.  All morning plugging away on John Gilpin's Ride, and in the afternoon coming to me to practise a dead language.  I thought of the good time I had wasted reading Virgil or wading through such incomprehensible nonsense as Hermann und Dorothea.  The insanity of it!  Learning, the empty breadbasket!  I thought of Carl who can recite Faust backwards, who never writes a book without praising the shit out of his immortal, incorruptible Goethe.  And yet he hadn't sense enough to take on a rich cunt and get himself a change of underwear.  There's something obscene in this love of the past which ends in breadlines and dugouts.  Something obscene about this spiritual racket which permits an idiot to sprinkle holy water over Big Berthas and dreadnoughts and high explosives.  Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

      Here was I, supposedly to spread the gospel of Franco- American amity - the emissary of a corpse who, after he had plundered right and left, after he had caused untold suffering and misery, dreamed of establishing universal peace.  Pfui!  What did they expect me to talk about, I wonder?  About Leaves of Grass, about the tariff walls, about the Declaration of Independence, about the latest gang war?  What?  Just what, I'd like to know.  Well, I'll tell you - I never mentioned these things.  I started right off the bat with a lesson in the physiology of love.  How the elephants make love - that was it!  It caught like wildfire.  After the first day there were no more empty benches.  After the first lesson in English they were standing at the door waiting for me.  We got along swell together.  They asked all sorts of questions, as though they had never learned a damn thing.  I let them fire away.  I taught them to ask still more ticklish questions.  Ask anything! - that was my motto.  I'm here as a plenipotentiary from the realm of free spirits.  I'm here to create a fever and a ferment.  "In some ways," says an eminent astronomer, "the material universe appears to be passing away like a tale that is told, dissolving into nothingness like a vision."  That seems to be the general feeling underlying the empty breadbasket of learning.  Myself, I don't believe it.  I don't believe a fucking thing these bastards try to shove down our throats.

      Between sessions, if I had no book to read, I would go upstairs to the dormitory and chat with the pions.  They were delightfully ignorant of all that was going on - especially in the world of art.  Almost as ignorant as the students themselves.  It was as if I had gotten into a private little madhouse with no exit signs.  Sometimes I snooped around under the arcades, watching the kids marching along with huge hunks of bread stuck in their dirty mugs.  I was always hungry myself, since it was impossible for me to go to breakfast which was handed out at some ungodly hour of the morning, just when the bed was getting toasty.  Huge bowls of blue coffee with chunks of white bread and no butter to go with it.  For lunch, beans or lentils with bits of meat thrown in to make it look appetizing.  Food fit for a chain gang, for rock breakers.  Even the wine was lousy.  Things were either diluted or bloated.  There were calories, but no cuisine.  M. l'Econome was responsible for it all.  So they said.  I don't believe that, either.  He was paid to keep our heads just above the water line.  He didn't ask if we were suffering from piles or carbuncles; he didn't inquire if we had delicate palates or the intestines of wolves.  Why should he?  He was hired at so many grams the plate to produce so many kilowatts of energy.  Everything in terms of horse power.  It was all carefully reckoned in the fat ledgers which the pasty-faced clerks scribbled in morning, noon and night.  Debit and credit, with a red line down the middle of the page.

      Roaming around the quadrangle with an empty belly most of the time, I got to feel slightly mad.  Like Charles the Silly, poor devil - only I had no Odette Champdivers with whom to play stinkfinger.  Half the time I had to grub cigarettes from the students, and during the lessons sometimes I munched a bit of dry bread with them.  As the fire was always going out on me I soon used up my allotment of wood.  It was the devil's own time coaxing a little wood out of the ledger clerks.  Finally I got so riled up about it that I would go out in the street and hunt for firewood, like an Arab.  Astonishing how little firewood you could pick up in the streets of Dijon.  However, these little foraging expeditions brought me into strange precincts.  Got to know the little street named after M. Philibert Papillon - a dead musician, I believe - where there was a cluster of whorehouses.  It was always more cheerful hereabouts; there was the smell of cooking, and wash hanging out to dry.  Once in a while I caught a glimpse of the poor half-wits who lounged about inside.  They were better off than the poor devils in the centre of town whom I used to bump into whenever I walked through a department store.  I did that frequently in order to get warm.  They were doing it for the same reason, I suppose.  Looking for someone to buy them a coffee.  They looked a little crazy, with the cold and the loneliness.  The whole town looked a bit crazy when the blue of evening settled over it.  You could walk up and down the main drive any Thursday in the week till doomsday and never meet an expansive soul.  Sixty or seventy thousand people - perhaps more - wrapped in wooden underwear and nowhere to go and nothing to do.  Turning out mustard by the carload.  Female orchestras grinding out The Merry Widow.  Silver service in the big hotels.  The ducal palace rotting away, stone by stone, limb by limb.  The trees screeching with frost.  A ceaseless clatter of wooden shoes.  The University celebrating the death of Goethe, or the birth, I don't remember which. (Usually it's the deaths that are celebrated.)  Idiotic affair, anyway.  Everybody yawning and stretching.

      Coming through the high driveway into the quadrangle a sense of abysmal futility always came over me.  Outside bleak and empty; inside, bleak and empty.  A scummy sterility hanging over the town, a fog of book-learning.  Slag and cinders of the past.  Around the interior courts were ranged the classrooms, little shacks such as you might see in the North woods, where the pedagogues gave free rein to their voices.  On the blackboard the futile abracadabra which the future citizens of the republic would have to spend their lives forgetting.  Once in a while the parents were received in the big reception room just off the driveway, where there were busts of the heroes of antiquity, such as Molière, Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, etc., all the scarecrows whom the cabinet ministers mention with moist lips whenever an immortal is added to the waxworks.  (No bust of Villon, no bust of Rabelais, no bust of Rimbaud.)  Anyway, they met here in solemn conclave, the parents and the stuffed shirts whom the State hires to bend the minds of the young.  Always this bending process, this landscape gardening to make the mind more attractive.  And the youngsters came too, occasionally - the little sunflowers who would soon be transplanted from the nursery in order to decorate the municipal grassplots.  Some of them were just rubber plants easily dusted with a torn chemise.  All of them jerking away for dear life in the dormitories as soon as night came on.  The dormitories! where the red lights glowed, where the bell rang like a fire alarm, where the treads were hollowed out in the scramble to reach the education cells.

      There were the profs!  During the first few days I got so far as to shake hands with a few of them, and of course there was always the salute with the hat when we passed under the arcades.  But as for a heart-to-heart talk, as for walking to the corner and having a drink together, nothing doing.  It was simply unimaginable.  Most of them looked as though they had had the shit scared out of them.  Anyway, I belonged to another hierarchy.  They wouldn't even share a louse with the likes of me.  They made me so damned irritated, just to look at them, that I used to curse them under my breath when I saw them coming.  I used to stand there, leaning against a pillar, with a cigarette in the corner of my mouth and my hat down over my eyes, and when they got within hailing distance I would let squirt a good gob and up with the hat.  I didn't even bother to open my trap and bid them the time of day.  Under my breath I simply said: "Fuck you, Jack!" and let it go at that.

      After a week it seemed as if I had been here all my life.  It was like a bloody, fucking nightmare that you can't throw off.  Used to fall into a coma thinking about it.  Just a few days ago I had arrived.  Nightfall.  People scurrying home like rats under the foggy lights.  The trees glittering with diamond-pointed malice.  I thought it all out, a thousand times or more.  From the station to the Lycee it was like a promenade through the Danzig Corridor, all deckle-edged, crannied, nerve- ridden.  A lane of dead bones, of crooked, cringing figures buried in shrouds.  Spines made of sardine bones.  The Lycee itself seemed to rise up out of a lake of thin snow, an inverted mountain that pointed down toward the centre of the earth where God or the Devil works always in a straitjacket grinding grist for that paradise which is always a wet dream.  If the sun ever shone I don't remember it.  I remember nothing but the cold greasy fogs that blew in from the frozen marshes over yonder where the railroad tracks burrowed into the lurid hills.  Down near the station was a canal, or perhaps it was a river, hidden away under a yellow sky, with little shacks pasted slap up against the rising edge of the banks.  There was a barracks too somewhere, it struck me, because every now and then I met little yellow men from Cochin-China - squirmy opium-faced runts peeping out of the baggy uniforms like dyed skeletons packed in excelsior.  The whole goddamned medievalism of the place was infernally ticklish and restive, rocking back and forth with low moans, jumping out at you from the eaves, hanging like broken-necked criminals from the gargoyles.  I kept looking back all the time, kept walking like a crab that you prong with a dirty fork.  All those fat little monsters, those slablike effigies pasted on the façade of the Église St. Michel, they were following me down the crooked lanes and around corners.  The whole facade of St. Michel seemed to open up like an album at night, leaving you face to face with the horrors of the printed page.  When the lights went out and the characters faded away flat, dead as words, then it was quite magnificent, the façade; in every crevice of the old gnarled front there was the hollow chant of the nightwind and over the lacy rubble of cold stiff vestments there was a cloudy absinthe-like drool of fog and frost.

      Here, where the church stood, everything seemed turned hind side front.  The church itself must have been twisted off its base by centuries of progress in the rain and snow.  It lay in the Place Edgar-Quinet, squat against the wind, like a dead mule.  Through the Rue de la Monnaie the wind rushed like white hair streaming wild: it whirled around the white hitching posts which obstructed the free passage of omnibuses and twenty-mule teams.  Swinging through this exit in the early morning hours I sometimes stumbled upon Monsieur Renaud who, wrapped in his cowl like a gluttonous monk, made overtures to me in the language of the sixteenth century.  Fallowing in step with Monsieur Renaud, the moon bursting through the greasy sky like a punctured balloon, I fell immediately into the realm of the transcendental.  M. Renaud had a precise speech, dry as apricots, with a heavy Brandenburger base.  Used to come at me full tilt from Goethe or Fichte, with deep base notes that rumbled in the windy corners of the Place like claps of last year's thunder.  Men of Yucatan, men of Zanzibar, men of Tierra del Fuego, save me from this glaucous hog rind!  The North piles up about me, the glacial fjords, the blue-tipped spines, the crazy lights, the obscene Christian chant that spread like an avalanche from Etna to the Aegean.  Everything frozen tight as scum, the mind locked and rimmed with frost, and through the melancholy bales of chitter-wit the choking gargle of louse-eaten saints.  White I am and wrapped in wool, swaddled, fettered, hamstrung, but in this I have no part.  White to the bone, but with a cold alkali base, with saffron-tipped fingers.  White, aye, but no brother of learning, no Catholic heart.  White and ruthless, as the men before me who sailed out of the Elbe.  I look at the sea, to the sky, to what is unintelligible and distantly near.

      The snow under foot scurries before the wind, blows, tickles, stings, lisps away, whirls aloft, showers, splinters, sprays down.  No sun, no roar of surf, no breaker's surge.  The cold north wind pointed with barbed shafts, icy, malevolent, greedy, blighting, paralysing.  The streets turn away on their crooked elbows; they break from the hurried sight, the stern glance.  They hobble away down the drifting lattice work, wheeling the church hind side front, mowing down the statues, flattening the monuments, uprooting the trees, stiffening the grass, sucking the fragrance out of the earth.  Leaves dull as cement: leaves no dew can bring to glisten again.  No moon will ever silver their listless plight.  The seasons are come to a stagnant stop, the trees blench and wither, the wagons roll in the mica ruts with slithering harplike thuds.  In the hollow of the white-tipped hills, lurid and boneless Dijon slumbers.  No man alive and walking through the night except the restless spirits moving southward toward the sapphire grids.  Yet I am up and about, a walking ghost, a white man terrorized by the cold sanity of this slaughterhouse geometry.  Who am I?  What am I doing here?  I fall between the cold walls of human malevolence, a white figure fluttering, sinking down through the cold lake, a mountain of skulls above me.  I settle down to the cold latitudes, the chalk steps washed with indigo. The earth in its dark corridors knows my step, feels a boot abroad, a wing stirring, a gasp and a shudder.  I hear the learning chaffed and chuzzled, the figures mounting upward, bat slime dripping aloft and clanging with pasteboard golden wings; I hear the trains collide, the chains rattle, the locomotive chugging, snorting, sniffing, steaming and pissing.  All things come to me through the clear fog with the odour of repetition, with yellow hangovers and Gadzooks and whettikins.  In the dead centre, far below Dijon, far below the hyperborean regions, stands God Ajax, his shoulders strapped to the mill wheel, the olives crunching, the green marsh water alive with croaking frogs.

 

      The fog and snow, the cold latitude, the heavy learning, the blue coffee, the unbuttered bread, the soup and lentils, the heavy pork-packer beans, the stale cheese, the soggy chow, the lousy wine have put the whole penitentiary into a state of constipation.  And just when everyone has become shit-tight the toilet pipes freeze.  The shit piles up like ant hills; one has to move down from the little pedestals and leave it on the floor.  It lies there stiff and frozen, waiting for the thaw.  On Thursdays the hunchback comes with his little wheelbarrow, shovels the cold, stiff turds with a broom and pan, and trundles off dragging his withered leg.  The corridors are littered with toilet paper; it sticks to your feet like flypaper.  When the weather moderates the odour gets ripe; you can smell it in Winchester forty miles away.  Standing over that ripe dung in the morning, with a toothbrush, the stench is so powerful that it makes your head spin.  We stand around in red flannel shirts, waiting to spit down the hole; it is like an aria from one of Verdi's great operas - an anvil chorus with pulleys and syringes.  In the night, when I am taken short, I rush down to the private toilet of M. le Censeur, just off the driveway.  My stool is always full of blood.  His toilet doesn't flush either but at least there is the pleasure of sitting down.  I leave my little bundle for him as a token of esteem.

      Towards the end of the meal each evening the veilleur de nuit drops in for his bit of cheer.  This is the only human being in the whole institution with whom I feel a kinship.  He is a nobody.  He carries a lantern and a bunch of keys.  He makes the rounds through the night, stiff as an automaton.  About the time the stale cheese is being passed around, in he pops for his glass of wine.  He stands there, with paw outstretched, his hair stiff and wiry, like a mastiff's, his cheeks ruddy, his moustache gleaming with snow.  He mumbles a word or two and Quasimodo brings him the bottle.  Then, with feet solidly planted, he throws back his head and down it goes, slowly in one long draught.  To me it's like he's pouring rubbies down his gullet.  Something about this gesture which seizes me by the hair.  It's almost as if he were drinking down the dregs of human sympathy, as if all the love and compassion in the world could be tossed off like that, in one gulp - as if that were all that could be squeezed together day after day.  A little less than a rabbit they have made him.  In the scheme of things he's not worth the brine to pickle a herring.  He's just a piece of live manure.  And he knows it.  When he looks around after his drink and smiles at us, the world seems to be falling to pieces.  It's a smile thrown across an abyss.  The whole stinking civilized world lies like a quagmire at the bottom of the pit, and over it, like a mirage, hovers this wavering smile.

      It was the same smile which greeted me at night when I returned from my rambles.  I remember one such night when, standing at the door waiting for the old fellow to finish his rounds, I had such a sense of well-being that I could have waited thus forever.  I had to wait perhaps half an hour before he opened the door.  I looked about me calmly and leisurely, drank everything in, the dead tree in front of the school with its twisted rope branches, the houses across the street which had changed colour during the night, which curved now more noticeably, the sound of a train rolling through the Siberian wastes, the railings painted by Utrillo, the sky, the deep wagon ruts.  Suddenly, out of nowhere, two lovers appeared; every few yards they stopped and embraced, and when I could no longer follow them with my eyes I followed the sound of their steps, heard the abrupt stop, and then the slow, meandering gait.  I could feel the slag and sump of their bodies when they leaned against a rail, heard their shoes creak as the muscles tightened for the embrace.  Through the town they wandered, through the crooked streets, toward the glassy canal where the water lay black as coal.  There was something phenomenal about it.  In all Dijon not two like them.

      Meanwhile the old fellow was making the rounds; I could hear the jingle of his keys, the crunching of his boots, the steady, automatic tread.  Finally I heard him coming through the driveway to open the big door, a monstrous arched portal without a moat in front of it.  I heard him fumbling at the lock, his hands stiff, his mind numbed.  As the door swung open I saw over his head a brilliant constellation crowning the chapel.  Every door was locked, every cell bolted.  The books were closed.  The night hung close, dagger-pointed, drunk as a maniac.  There it was, the infinitude of emptiness.  Over the chapel, like a bishop's mitre, hung the constellation, every night, during the winter months, it hung there low over the chapel.  Low and bright, a handful of dagger points, a dazzle of pure emptiness.  The old fellow followed me to the turn of the drive.  The door closed silently.  As I bade him goodnight I caught that desperate, hopeless smile again, like a meteoric flash over the rim of a lost world.  And again I saw him standing in the refectory, his head thrown back and the rubies pouring down his gullet.  The whole Mediterranean seemed to be buried inside him - the orange groves, the cypress trees, the winged statues, the wooden temples, the blue sea, the stiff masks, the mystic numbers, the mythological birds, the sapphire skies, the eaglets, the sunny coves, the blind bards, the bearded heroes.  Gone all that.  Sunk beneath the avalanche from the North.  Buried, dead forever.  A memory.  A wild hope.

      For just a moment I linger at the carriageway.  The shroud, the pall, the unspeakable, clutching emptiness of it all.  Then I walk quickly along the gravel path near the wall, past the arches and columns, the iron staircases, from one quadrangle to the other.  Everything is locked tight.  Locked for the winter.  I find the arcade leading to the dormitory.  A sickish light spills down over the stairs from the grimy, frosted windows.  Everywhere the pain is peeling off.  The stones are hollowed out, the banister creaks; a damp sweat oozes from the flagging and forms a pale, fuzzy aura pierced by the feeble red light at the head of the stairs.  I mount the last flight, the turret, in a sweat and terror.  In pitch darkness I grope my way through the deserted corridor, every room empty, locked, moulding away.  My hand slides along the wall seeking the keyhole.  A panic comes over me as I grasp the doorknob.  Always a hand at my collar ready to yank me back.  Once inside the room I bolt the door.  It's a miracle which I perform each night, the miracle of getting inside without being strangled, without being struck down by an axe.  I can hear the rats scurrying through the corridor, gnawing away over my head between the thick rafters.  The light glares like burning sulphur and there is the sweet, sickish stench of a room which is never ventilated.  In the corner stands the coal box, just as I left it.  The fire is out.  A silence so intense that it sounds like Niagara Falls in my ears.

      Alone, with a tremendous empty longing and dread.  The whole room for my thoughts.  Nothing but myself and what I think, what I fear.  Could think the most fantastic thoughts, could dance, spit, grimace, curse, wail - nobody would ever know, nobody would ever hear.  The thought of such absolute privacy is enough to drive me mad.  It's like a clean birth.  Everything cut away.  Separate, naked, alone.  Bliss and agony simultaneously.  Time on your hands.  Each second weighing on you like a mountain.  You drown in it.  Deserts, seas, lakes, oceans.  Time beating away like a meat axe.  Nothingness.  The world.  The me and the not-me.  Oomaharumooma.  Everything has to have a name.  Everything has to be learned, tested, experienced.  Faites comme chez vous, cheri.

      The silence descends in volcanic chutes.  Yonder, in the barren hills, rolling onward toward the great metallurgical regions, the locomotives are pulling their merchant products.  Over steel and iron beds they roll, the ground sown with slag and cinders and purple ore.  In the baggage cars, kelps, fishplate, rolled iron, sleepers, wire rods, plates and sheets, laminated articles, hot rolled hoops, splints and mortar carriages, and Zores ore.  The wheels U-80 millimetres or over.  Pass splendid specimens of Anglo-Norman architecture, pass pedestrians and pederasts, open hearth furnaces, basic Bessemer mills, dynamos and transformers, pig iron castings and steel ingots.  The public at large, pedestrians and pederasts, goldfish and spun-glass palm trees, donkeys sobbing, all circulating freely through quincuncial alleys.  At the Place du Bresil a lavender eye.

      Going back in a flash over the women I've known.  It's like a chain which I've forged out of my own misery.  Each one bound to the other.  A fear of living separate, of staying born.  The door of the womb always on the latch.  Dread and longing.  Deep in the blood the pull of paradise.  The beyond.  Always the beyond.  It must have all started with the navel.  They cut the umbilical cord, give you a slap on the ass, and [hey] presto! you're out in the world, adrift, a ship without a rudder.  You look at the stars and then you look at your navel.  You grow eyes everywhere - in the armpits, between the lips, in the roots of your hair, on the soles of your feet.  What is distant becomes near, what is near becomes distant.  Inner-outer, a constant flux, a shedding of skins, a turning inside out.  You drift around like that for years and years, until you find yourself in the dead centre, and there you slowly rot, slowly crumble to pieces, get dispersed again.  Only your name remains.